By David Futrelle
After a man identified by witnesses as a participant in a Madden video game tournament in Jacksonville, Florida opened fire on fellow gamers, killing several and wounding numerous others before turning his gun on himself, some of the regulars in the Kotaku in Action subreddit are directing their anger at one of their favorite targets — game journalists, who these Redditors are accusing in advance of blaming the shootings on violent video games and game culture.
Yep. The mall at which the shooting took place has only just been cleared by police, and no articles have yet been published on video game news sites blaming games or gamers or game culture for a mass shooting allegedly carried out by a gamer at a game tournament, but Redditors are already getting mad online about the hypothetical articles they think are coming that will dare to suggest that this mass shooting might just have something to do with the incredible toxicity of the gaming subculture.
Currently, these are the top comments in the main thread on the shooting on Reddit’s Kotaku in Action, which desccribes itself as “the main hub for GamerGate on Reddit.”
![[–]Taidan-X [score hidden] an hour ago Games journalists now eagerly awaiting the news of the race of the shooter, so they can decide whether this is a "senseless tragedy that we shouldn't politicise" or "more evidence of the toxicity of Gamers". Or as I call it, The Atrocity Ethnicity Lottery. permalinkembedsavereportgive goldreply [–]peargarden [score hidden] an hour ago It's sad to think that some journalists are probably disappointed that it was a Madden tournament and not something like CS:GO so they can't spin the "violent videogame shooters make gamers violent" angle. permalinkembedsaveparentreportgive goldreply [–]Stark0s [score hidden] 58 minutes ago It's Madden. They can still try to play the "toxic masculinity"TM card. permalinkembedsaveparentreportgive goldreply [–]GarrioValereBest I can do is half homo. Make sure it's hot. [score hidden] 56 minutes ago If the shooter is who some people are claiming it is, he also extensively played Counterstrike, so merry christmas journalists. permalinkembedsaveparentreportgive goldreply [–]christianknight [score hidden] 54 minutes ago They always have the gun control issue to fall back on. permalinkembedsaveparentreportgive goldreply [–]B-VOLLEYBALL-READYThe internet was a mistake. [score hidden] an hour ago Seriously, keep an eye out for those pieces of shit trying to blame video games for this on Twitter. We had some utterly reprehensible comments after the Orlando shootings. https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/4nvfmz/misc_listing_all_the_people_in_and_around_the/ permalinkembedsaveparentreportgive goldreply [–]PikaTools [score hidden] 59 minutes ago I've already seen some randos comment blaming games. I expect it to be ten fold since it was at a gaming event this time.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/jgffjkg.png?resize=580%2C612&ssl=1)
Some on Twitter had similar reactions to the shootings.
And since this was at a Madden tournament, I really, really hope the media and journalists don't start blaming violent video games or write stupid shit like "the toxic nature of gamers", but I have a feeling they will most likely happen.
— Allie-RX (@AllieRX) August 26, 2018
boy I can't wait for the scummy journalists of the world to spin this into more "violence in video games is the problem" narratives.
— MarioWrath (@Leafretv) August 26, 2018
https://twitter.com/realh0r1z0n/status/1033802067964583936
Methinks game journalists are trying to collect themselves after a collective cream at this news.
— ゴゴゴThe Juudeゴゴゴ (@juukuchi) August 26, 2018
I can already see the articles from journalists eagerly pushing the “violence in video games” narrative; showing no respect to the victims.
— Captain Hat (@CaptHat211) August 26, 2018
Glad you’ve got your priorities straight here. Wouldn’t want a horrifying tragedy at a games tournament to cause any needless self-reflection.
@Button: Actually, from their perspective that’s exactly what they think feminists are.
Subconsciously, men, or at least most of them, think every woman is the same person, and unless they were an orphan or something, that means on some level every man thinks every woman he encounters is his mother.
It’s also why (straight) men have such a hard time handling rejection. If one woman thinks his sperm wouldn’t be fit to make a baby worth carrying and raising, it means none of them would.
It’s an ugly and ultimately maladaptive way of thinking in today’s world, but to be fair it makes sense in evolutionary terms. Having one fixed idea of a potential mate saves loads of cognitive energy, which is important for creatures with big, disproportionately nutrient-consuming brains whose main survival strategy is based around a combination of intelligence and endurance.
Meh. I just wanna know exactly which gaming journalist is gonna blame a shooting on… gaming ? Reaaally ?
Reality really doesn’t matter anymore, does it ?
@Sinkable John
They’re Gamergaters. Reality never mattered to them.
@rainwoman0451 : that seem a big, stinking pile of assumptions, bordering on evo-psy malarkay.
I know for a fact that a lot of entitled white people are actually perfectly aware how everything work, but force themselves to not see it. If you add to that all the actual decent guys, that mean your theory only work on a small amount of people.
Ok, my two penn’orth on the problem. An American. With a gun.
I give it five more hours before they make the obligatory QAnon junction.
Either the shooter was an international pizza-pedophile, or he was a vigilante and the tournament was in fact a secret international pizza-pedophile meeting.
Also it was actually a 4D chess tournament and Trump won.
Anyway, bullshit aside, I just wanna know how come a dude was allowed inside tournament grounds with a gun. Last week I was at a street theatre festival and the entirety of downtown was closed off with mandatory searches just to keep glass bottles and other possible makeshift projectiles out. Even the friggin stores stopped stocking bottled beer for a week and replaced it with cans. (not as awful as it sounds, it really is an amazing festival and the goddamn stalls had beer that was both really good and decently priced, so we didn’t actually suffer from that embargo)
Now you’re telling me it ain’t possible to keep people from entering one single building with firearms ?
@Sinkable John:
Security measures aren’t infallible.
People are not allowed to bring fireworks to football (soccer) games. Even though there are bag checks people manage to smuggle them in.
Then there were the two security fuck ups at the Munich and Frankfurt airports at the beginning of August.
Various agencies test the efficacy of security measures. And every time they perform a sting they manage to smuggle prohibited stuff into wherever it isn’t supposed to be. Shooter probably had a good hidey hole.
A guy I know who has MS and is in need of a catheter smuggles alcohol into venues by hiding a small bottle of liquor in an easy to find place and puts a big ass bottle of liquor into the back pack where he stores his urine bag. Nobody ever looks there.
I saw this as well. They are true scumbags. This should be proof enough. No “Wow. This is so sad,” or “I know we go defend gamers, but this is indefensible”. Nothing like that; just straightaway talking about race and playing victim when OTHER people are shot dead.
There’s a wonderful word in the Kivil language, “mokita”, which means the truth that we all know but agree not to talk about. I keep thinking of it every time there’s a new mass shooting incident and people rush to assign blame to mental illness, gaming, immigrants, “the Jews”, etc. Anything except what is actually motivating these shootings. Anything to avoid honestly confronting the toxic stew of aggressive hypermasculinity, white supremacy, and gun culture in America. Let’s all just keep on having earnest debates over whether women are people, because that’s such a useful expenditure of our energy while the clock continues to tick on climate change and other major problems go unaddressed.
OT: did anyone see this? A man in Texas has been randomly shooting female drivers because he thinks they’re “incompetent” and should be at home having male babies:
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/briannasacks/texas-man-shooting-female-drivers
Just another lone wolf with extreme misogynistic views and access to guns. Nothing to see here.
Just to clarify (the edit thingy ran out): I’m not frustrated at us for engaging in the debate. I’m frustrated that it exists at all. I’m frustrated that terrible ideas keep gushing forth endlessly from social media and are given a platform. I’m frustrated that total hacks like Jordan Peterson and Milo Yiannopolous are taken seriously and invited onto college campuses. I’m frustrated that clicks and reads are more important than basic human rights, which ought to have been a settled question long ago. I’m frustrated that, fifty years from now, we’ll all be huddled around the embers of the last tree on earth, wheezing and starving, listening to some asshole whining about not getting a date.
Sorry, I know this isn’t anything that hasn’t been said here hundreds of times before. I’m just so fed up with this endless cycle of horrific violence, and people averting their gazes.
@Buttercup:
I’ll even one-up that and say that I’m gobsmacked Peterson ever managed to get a PhD in the first place. Perhaps he wasn’t comparing humans to lobsters and saying that enforced monogamy is what humanity needs to survive thirty years ago, but those aren’t the sort of views I’d expect a professor who had worked at McGill and Harvard to stumble into at a later point.
@Buttercup : I do agree with the word you explained. While there certainly exist some dim-witted individuals that don’t know the true reason for thoses incident, most actually know why. Even among the trumpite. It’s just that each time someone bring up the real reason, she or he is shouted down to silence.
I often wonder this too. I guess it’s because privilege is just as big if not a bigger factor in how well one does in school than intelligence or work ethic. I think we want to believe that the best and brightest are the ones that have the most academic success and academia is the only real meritocracy, but it’s not so.
@dslucia:
I’m convinced that he bullshat his way through that, the way he does with everything: just wandered and maundered along, seeming deep while actually being shallow. And there was probably a big dispute as to whether to give him the degree, until someone shut it down by saying something like “Oh, just give it to him — otherwise, he’ll be back here year after year, haranguing us until we do. This way, we’ll be rid of him, and he’ll be somebody else’s problem!” And now, he’s EVERYBODY’s problem…
@Buttercup:
Shit.
Donnie’s like a nuclear reactor of hate and stupidity, isn’t he…ever since he’s been pingponging around in the White House (and between there and his stinking golf courses), there’s been nothing but a chain reaction of violent and bigoted men of all kinds, plus no small number of those in whom all the bigotries are represented in perfect synergy. There are threats of a violent revolt coming if Donnie’s impeached? Fuck that noise, it’s already happening.
I don’t know how Peterson got his Ph.D., but this is how he got his job:
https://www.thestar.com/opinion/2018/05/25/i-was-jordan-petersons-strongest-supporter-now-i-think-hes-dangerous.html
(I think this has been posted on here before, apologies if so.)
Peterson likely benefited from his white male privilege in his academic career, but it was even more crucial in his pursuit of becoming a pseudointellectual cult leader.
@Dslucia:
Has Peterson got tenure? It’s possible he kept his head down until he knew he couldn’t easily be fired. That said, it still seems likely that someone who starts with a fair bit of privilege can get away with bad behavior for a very long time as long as they don’t direct it at anyone directly above themselves. Especially in an environment where one can play it off as “eccentricity,” and eccentricity is not only expected, but sometimes considered in itself to be evidence of intelligence.
Awful news. A shooting like that probably can’t be assigned to one cause only, but that doesn’t mean reducing access to guns won’t reduce shootings. NRA types will throw around other things to obfuscate that, saying that the problems are mental illness, other people NOT having guns, etc.
And toxic masculinity may have been a part. I mean, people in general get disproportionately angry. Anger isn’t gendered. I’m not a man and I have anger problems that I’m still working on (I haven’t slapped anybody in four years but I’m still too irritable sometimes, and people (mostly) don’t deserve to be grumbled at.).
At the same time, an attitude of entitlement, like men thinking they’re better than women, can provoke or legitimize violence. Fictional example: scene in The Departed, where one man attacks another because the first says something like, “Why are you drinking cranberry juice? You have your period?” Been a while since I saw it, but I think the in-story reason for him punching the guy after this remark was to show how wound up and stressed he was. The insult guy may have been on the opposite side and WAS trying to provoke him. But when I put myself in the character’s shoes, I couldn’t imagine reacting like that. I’d probably just frown and move away. I imagine most men wouldn’t be all *nonsensical comment implying I am a woman = COMMENCE IMMEDIATE VIOLENCE* either, but it’s a good sum-up of how toxic masculinity can work.
Also also, on the Peterson topic… @Rabid Rabbit – Thanks for the article! I hadn’t seen it. Schiff’s a bit long-winded and equivocating, but his message is clear: Peterson’s way too full of himself. Most people I know in academics talk a lot about collaboration, but Peterson was even upset at having an ethics committee review his work. So much for Mr. Social Order.
I also read an article it linked to from the New York Review, and this part was pretty telling for me, besides the whole cult-of-personality thing:
Classic intellectual-defending-fascism talk. It’s the same sort of language that Ezra Pound used in defending Mussolini back in the 1930s (in his book Guide to Kulchur).
Edited to add the link: https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/03/19/jordan-peterson-and-fascist-mysticism/
Yeah, I got disabused of that notion when I was getting my Masters in English Ed. I was in a graduate-level lit class filled with English and Lit grad students, and the professor had us print enough copies of our midterm paper to hand out to everyone in the class, so we could all benefit from each other’s in-depth analysis of the works we had chosen. In that class of 20-ish – again, all English and Lit graduate students – there were only 3 people besides me whose papers weren’t littered with grammatical errors throughout. Like, really, really basic errors.
Graduate-level English majors.
Who couldn’t write.
So…yeah.
@Godzilla
I feel you.
Online gaming communities are, for the most part, a cesspool of misogyny, racism, homophobia and xenophobia. I have a friend who never uses her headphone because she will start getting immediately harassed the minute our teammates realize she’s a girl.
Likewise, I’ve gotten plenty of racist comments over my Latino accent over the years.
And yes, I realize it’s #NotAllGamers, but let’s get real here. Gaming is a hobby which is most accessible for White, middle to upper class, teenagers and young adults; given the time and resources you need to spend on said hobby. It comes as no surprise then that gaming communities are filled with the worst type of entitled assholes.
I’ve personally seen at least three of my former friends take up fascist attitudes over the years, with one of them becoming a straight up Holocaust denialist Nazi
I am only a oflinegamer and ragequiting has happened, but not more.
I would not start onlinegaming, because I have heared so much about gamersgate and what is normal in games, that nope, don’t want that.
Competionwise in my childhood I had a brother who was always better at sports. The days when I beat him in anythink were good, because I knew that I did work hard for it. If not than it was normal, but there wasn’t any bad blood afterwards.
Bad games like bad movies or bad comics is an excuse for not really doing any work, but organisations like gamersgate or toxic onlinecomunities I can believe in. (Of course we can talk about antiwomenmesages in games, but a sportsgame shouldn’t be that much of a problem)
Well, someone has linked today’s shooting to video games, except it’s not Video Game Journalists. It’s the Trump fan-girl, Republican Attorney General of Florida, Pam Biondi.
ETA: The embedded link isn’t working, so here it is:
https://splinternews.com/floridas-attorney-general-finds-baffling-new-way-to-bla-1828628029
Except, strangely (well not so strange for clueless Pubtards), she somehow winds up discussing how location services in video games are dangerous to children. WTF that has to do with a shooting of adults at a tournament, no clue.
Not so random shootings
Sorry, been absentee, but this story may be of interest.
@Buttercup
May I ask where the Kivil language is spoken? I’ve tried looking for it, but I can’t seem to find anything about it. The closest thing I’ve found is kovil, a Tamil word for a kind of temple.